Shadows in Scarlet

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  “Why, I was planning to call her tonight. I’d be happy to ask about the sword for you.”

  Carrie forced a smile. “That’s very helpful, but we were wondering if the Grants are still living at …”

  “I’ll tell you all about it on Monday,” Cynthia rolled on. “I’m putting together a little luncheon for the people involved in the Grant project, and I expect both of you to come. My home, twelve noon sharp.”

  Resistance is futile, Amanda intoned to herself, and said, “Thank you. I’ll be there.”

  A shame the major character in this comedy of manners and errors wouldn’t. She still wished James had jumped out at Cynthia during the seance. Several yards of tartan wool would make a great muffler.

  Shreds of wool had survived longer than his flesh. Go home to Dundreggan, he’d said.

  She tried planting another seed in Cynthia’s fertile brain. “Mrs. Chancellor, we were talking the other day about a funeral for Captain Grant—what if there’s an old family cemetery at Dundreggan, maybe you could ask Lady Norah if… .”

  Wayne hobbled through the library door. “Hello, Mother.”

  Cynthia spun toward him. “Wayne, darling, you mustn’t walk on that ankle.” She pulled a chair from against the wall and seated him in it.

  “Really, Mother, it’s a lot better. Oh, hello, Mrs. Benedetto.”

  Lucy crept into the entrance hall. “Hello Carrie, Amanda, how are you? Wayne. Mrs. Chancellor.”

  Cynthia swept down on the elderly woman. “Why Lucy, where’s Vernon?”

  “Well, er, ah, he just couldn’t… .” Lucy flushed. She opened her handbag and looked desperately around inside, as though her husband was hiding there. “He’s not feeling well. Sorry, Mrs. Chancellor.”

  Carrie and Amanda shared an amused glance. Good for Vernon, not to answer Cynthia’s summons if he didn’t want to.

  Roy conducted the last tour of the day through the hall and out the door. His voice faded into the distance. “If you would do us the very great honor of visiting the gift …” Not bad, Amanda thought. Just keep on going into the parking lot and away home.

  Two of Hewitt’s assistants trudged up the steps. “Here it is, Mrs. Chancellor.” They started opening boxes and bundles and setting up lights.

  “Wonderful! I can hardly wait!” Cynthia stepped between Lucy and Amanda. She dropped her voice, but her whisper could penetrate steel. “Lucy, have I set your mind at rest about those footsteps?”

  “The ones going up the drive at night.” Lucy nodded soberly. “I hope I wasn’t telling tales out of school.”

  Behind Amanda Wayne emitted an aggrieved sigh. Carrie, on Amanda’s other side, looked around curiously.

  Amanda thought, footsteps? Was that why Lucy brought the apple pie and checked to make sure she was all right, because the Benedettos had heard footsteps? Sure, they could have belonged to a prowler. But between paranoia and the paranormal, Amanda chose a dazed and disoriented James, whose newly awakened perceptions had been drawn toward Melrose Hall. Not that she was going to announce, Oh that’s all right everyone, it was only a ghost.

  “I so appreciate your telling me,” Cynthia went on. “The mother’s always the last to know.” She turned to Amanda and gave her a delicate little half-hug. “I’m so pleased, dear.”

  Whoa, deja vu! Cynthia and Lucy were looking at her the same way they had the day the display was set up, like tigers eyeing a goat. Suddenly Amanda remembered Lucy’s embarrassment the night of the pie. The older woman must have decided the footsteps belonged to a guy sneaking in to see Amanda after hours. Trying to make points, she’d mentioned her suspicions to Cynthia. And to Wayne—everyone knew he had a major crush on …

  Amanda backed off, only to collide with the banister and the edge of staircase. No way! I have not been getting it on with Wayne after hours!

  The faces in front of her swelled and deflated like balloons, Cynthia smug, Lucy indulgent, Carrie dumbfounded, Wayne puzzled. Had Cynthia even bothered to ask him about it, for God’s sake? But even if he denied everything she’d just think he was being coy—she never listened to anyone, especially him. Shit, Amanda thought.

  “I’ve embarrassed her, I’m so sorry, Amanda sweetheart.” Cynthia made soothing gestures. “Yes, yes, I know, you and Wayne were intending to keep it a secret—like naughty children, weren’t we—but that’s all right, I know how to be discreet. Mum’s the word, right, Lucy? No announcements yet.”

  Lucy nodded eagerly, no doubt delighted to be treated, however briefly, as an equal. Cynthia turned to give Wayne a hug, too. His face emerged from her vest flushed with gratification. He looked like a kid taking down his Christmas stocking and discovering Santa had come through after all.

  Shit, Amanda repeated. But, I’m not all hot and bothered over Wayne but over a man who’s been dead two hundred years wasn’t going to cut it. “Mrs. Chancellor,” she attempted, “I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding, I’m not …”

  Helen Medina burst in the door, juggling pieces of camera equipment. “Got it all set up? Super. Cynthia, I’m sure you want to do the honors.”

  Cynthia, diverted onto another scent, bustled across the entrance hall. Hewitt’s assistants had erected a tall display stand beside the panels of the exhibit. Whatever stood on top of it, something about the size of a large vase, was draped with a cloth. Helen turned on the lights and focussed them on the stand.

  Amanda sidled away from both the staircase and Wayne’s chair, trying to stop hyperventilating. No wonder Sally looked so bland in her portrait. If she splurged on an emotion she’d have suffocated herself.

  “Ready?” Cynthia asked Helen.

  Helen gave her a thumbs-up. “Have at it.”

  To the accompanying whir of Helen’s video camera, Cynthia posed, smiled, and lifted the cloth from the display. She revealed James’s head. Everyone oohed and ahed. The few drops of blood that remained in Amanda’s face drained into her feet, leaving her cheeks prickling cold.

  “Normally,” Cynthia told the camera, “we would do a skull reconstruction with computer graphics. But a 3-D display can be enjoyed by so many more people. Our labs made a cast of Captain Grant’s skull, and measured skin depths and muscle connections… .”

  Her words faded out and in like the whine of a siren. Amanda scrabbled after her wits. The lab technicians had really strutted their stuff with this one. They had the patrician lines of James’s face down beautifully—the high forehead, the straight nose, the chiseled lips, the square jaw. The skin was painted in lifelike tones. The glass eyes glinted too dark a blue, but the techies had only the portrait to go on. And the white wig made him look like a fop. Which, in spite of the wig and even the snuffbox, he most emphatically was not.

  James wasn’t a dummy, staring blankly ahead without intelligence, or emotion, or character. He was real.

  The entrance hall strobed. Her stomach lurched. She was going to faint. She was going to throw up. She was going make a spectacle of herself right here in front of God, Cynthia, and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

  Amanda spun, stumbled down the hall to her apartment, and collapsed on the couch just as the black dots spinning through her vision coalesced into darkness.

  Chapter Twelve

  Within seconds her head cleared and Amanda was damning her stays and Cynthia equally. Smooth one. She’d covered herself in glory that time.

  Carrie hurried in the door, sat down beside her, and peered into her face. “That particular shade of green skin doesn’t go with a red dress. Are you all right? Or just hyperventilating after that dirty trick Cynthia played on you?”

  For a moment Amanda thought she was talking about Cynthia suddenly unveiling James’s mortal face. But Carrie didn’t know about James. “You know Cynthia,” Amanda muttered, sitting up straighter. “She doesn’t leap to conclusions, she makes them up out of whole cloth.”

  “All that about footsteps, you mean?”

  “Lucy Benedetto heard footsteps coming t
his way, I don’t know when, last week sometime. So she figured Wayne was sneaking in to see me after hours—he hasn’t been too obvious or anything. And she’s so anxious to make points with Cynthia she told her… . No, I’m not mad at Lucy. She means well. So does Cynthia, for that matter, deciding I’ll make her a dandy daughter-in-law, signed, sealed, and delivered on a silver tray. I’ve got to stop playing Sally, everyone thinks I’m just so sweet and biddable.” An acid taste rose in her throat and she swallowed. “Now I’ve got to either browbeat Wayne into telling the truth or tackle Cynthia myself.”

  “You don’t think Wayne put Cynthia up to it?”

  “He seemed just as shocked as I was, if no way as horrified.”

  “She had me going there for a minute,” Carrie said. “So did you. You looked as though you’d seen a ghost.”

  Something soft but intense exploded inside Amanda’s head. The truth about Wayne. The truth about James’s death. The truth about James, period. All the truths had to come out, or none of them would be valid. Like a house of cards, each reality leaned against another. “I have seen a ghost.”

  “What?”

  “I think the Benedettos really did hear footsteps. It’s kind of comforting that they did. It means I’m not crazy.”

  “What?”

  “Cynthia didn’t have to stage a seance,” Amanda explained. “Captain Grant’s ghost really is here. Lucy heard his footsteps coming up to the house. He’s focussed on the house. He died here. That’s why he’s buried here.”

  Carrie looked around the room, probably expecting to see white-coated guys with butterfly nets hiding in the bedroom. When she spoke her voice was very gentle. “Amanda, I understand why you’re hooked on Grant—it’s a compelling story. That skull reconstruction gave me the willies, too. There probably are things going bump in the night here at Melrose, tree limbs and the cat and the house settling. You’re here by yourself, of course you’re hearing things. But a ghost? Come on.”

  “I’m not making him up. I’m not imagining him.”

  “Well no, it’s not necessarily your imagination. There’s something called autosuggestion, kind of self-hypnosis, like when you’re sitting up late reading a horror novel and you just know a monster’s hiding beneath the bed. Except you’re not seeing a monster, you’re seeing this exciting man.”

  Amanda saw James sitting on the staircase, his scabbard across his knees, his eyes hurt and bewildered. “It’s not like that. I have seen him. I’ve talked to him. I’ve touched him. I knew it was him before you and Hewitt identified him. He said he was from Dundreggan before I saw the name on the picture.”

  “I know sexual frustration’s been used as an excuse for everything from witches to global warming,” Carrie came back, “and I don’t mean to imply …”

  “… that I’m Exhibit A?” Amanda grabbed Carrie’s forearms and fixed her with what she had the awful feeling was a maniacal gaze. “I’m not saying that’s not in there. But there’s more to it than that.”

  Carrie met Amanda’s eyes evenly but doubtfully.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “I believe you believe you saw something.”

  I knew this would happen. But she couldn’t go back now. Amanda released Carrie, hauled herself to her feet, and walked over to the open door. Voices echoed down the hall, Helen playing straight woman to Cynthia. Amanda hoped Wayne’s ankle would keep him in the entrance hall.

  “I know I sound like I’ve lost it,” she said. “But James is real. He’s handsome, he’s intelligent, he’s charming, and in that uniform he buckles a hell of a swash. He actually lived in the eighteenth century—he’s given me insights into the speech and the culture I’d never get out of a book!”

  Carrie was watching her, not blinking.

  “He’s different. Even without his sword he’s got an edge to him that’s, that’s—glamorous. You know, the old Scots word meaning enchanting, casting a spell over, not Entertainment Tonight glamorous… .” She sat back down. “Really. I swear on Thomas Mason’s diaries.”

  “You can actually talk to him?”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “Have you—er—touched him?”

  “Oh yeah. When he’s solid enough to touch.”

  “And you’re the one who claims to have no romantic illusions.”

  “This is no illusion, even if it is romantic as hell.”

  “Are you sure it’s no illusion? I mean, okay, so you see him and everything, but even with living, breathing guys you see what you want to see.”

  “I know,” Amanda said with a groan. “I know. Be careful what you ask for and all of that.”

  Carrie shook her head. “I’m sorry, Amanda. I thought my kids had thrown me every possible curve, but you really take the cake with this one. If you’ll excuse the mangled metaphor.”

  “Mangled metaphors are my stock in trade.” At least Carrie was listening to her. Amanda indulged in a rueful laugh of her own. “This is totally absurd. I know that. But it’s true.”

  “Okay, okay, I don’t disbelieve you. Is that good enough?”

  “That’s a start. Thanks.”

  “You said you had a theory about why he was buried in the garden?”

  “It’s more than a theory.” Amanda launched into the true history of Isabel, Archibald, and James, a tragedy in two acts, concluding, “So it was murder, pure and simple.”

  Carrie mulled it all over. “The other officers must have noticed James wasn’t at his assigned post before the battle.”

  “So each one thought he was some place else. There hasn’t been a battle in history where everybody was right where he was supposed to be.”

  “Archibald did become the heir,” admitted Carrie. “He did go home and marry Isabel, and James really was buried here at Melrose even though the record says he died at Greensprings Farm. But as for Archibald being the guilty party, once you eliminate James’s—er, testimony—it’s all circumstantial evidence. At a distance of two hundred years, yet. You’ll never be able to bring Archibald to trial, let alone prove him guilty.”

  “Maybe it’s just as well the Scots have that ambiguous verdict of ‘Not Proven,’” Amanda said. “No, the only way James is going to get any satisfaction at this late date is by my revealing the truth.”

  “That’s what he wants?”

  She could hear James’s smooth voice in the back of her mind. “He wants revenge. He wants his sword. He wants to go home. I can help with the first, and we may have located the sword, but getting him home? It’s up to the relatives, the Grants, to say what they want done with him. No reason they won’t just tell Hewitt to bury him at Yorktown. I’ve tried hinting to Cynthia about old family cemeteries and such, maybe she’d pay for shipping him back to Scotland—making the arrangements would give her an excuse to mingle some more with the aristocracy, after all—but she’d love having a big recreation military funeral here, too.”

  “The question,” said Carrie, “is whether you’re willing to let him go.”

  Bull’s-eye. Amanda eyed her own hands, folded so tightly on her lap the knuckles glinted white, her bones shining beneath her skin. She was going to have to let him go. Whether as a ghost or as a soldier on the prowl, James was not even remotely a prospect for long-term commitment. “I may not get the chance to do anything. Last night I suggested to him that he was dead. That upset him. He may already be gone for good. Which doesn’t mean I can’t tell his story.”

  “No, it doesn’t. We need to see if there’re any more family records, to back the story up. To give you the excuse to tell it—for the sake of the article, of course.”

  “The article. Absolutely.”

  “Cynthia seems to be trying to stake the Grants out as her own personal territory,” Carrie went on with a smile, “but we can make an end run around her. If you’re brave enough.”

  “I sure am. After today. After the way she faked that seance yesterday and then made me her accessory after the fact.”

&nbs
p; “How she’d do it?”

  “She smuggled in some nail scissors and cut off the flowers while everyone’s eyes were closed, and she brought in her own candle, one of those that won’t stay out.”

  “She’s a force of nature, isn’t she?” Carrie asked in admiration and resentment mingled. “But you are an accessory. If you spill the beans, she’ll just laugh and say it was all a joke, and then give you a bad reference.”

  “She may do that anyway, after all this with Wayne.”

  “You stick to your guns with Wayne. If you don’t want him, you don’t have to have him. This is the twenty-first century.”

  “Sometimes it is,” said Amanda. “Cynthia thinks I’m a sweet little eighteenth-century sap, and James thinks I’m a saucy little eighteenth-century baggage.”

  Even as Carrie laughed she raised a cautionary finger. “I don’t know what’s going on here …”

  “Something weird,” Amanda assured her.

  “So keep your wits about you, okay?”

  “I’ll try. But it’s kind of like trying to swim upstream. The current can get a little strong.”

  “Then climb out onto the bank and walk.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Amanda said, without the least sarcasm.

  Cynthia’s voice drifted down the hall, making concluding remarks. Amanda made a face. “What’s really funny is that when Cynthia had her eyes closed after her flower and candle routine, James lifted the candlestick right in front of her and she never saw it.”

  “I wish I’d been there.” Carrie glanced toward the door. Cynthia’s brisk footsteps were approaching, punctuated by Wayne’s uneven ones. “Speak of the devil.”

  Amanda groaned. “I’m going to go hide, if you don’t mind covering for me.”

  “Go on. I’ll tell them you’re indisposed.”

  “Don’t tell them I almost tossed my cookies, Cynthia will think I’m pregnant and start hiring florists and caterers. God, can you imagine what it would be like having sex with Wayne? Cynthia might just as well be standing there at the foot of the bed giving directions—put it there, dear, in and out, that’s right—if she ever bothered to notice the process herself, that is. I’m not so sure she didn’t find Wayne under a cabbage leaf.”